Tom’s selection from the SAA program

A beautiful day in sunny San Francisco, and the lobby of the Hilton hotel is packed with thousands of archaeologists. Can you think of anything more unusual? This must be the SAAs: the annual meeting of American archaeologists. The biggest archaeology conference in the world as far as I know, with a bible-sized program book.  Do you find it difficult to navigate your way through the three days of millions of parallel sessions? Don’t worry, just follow my selection of sessions and you’ll be guaranteed to see the best SAA has to offer (read: everything even vaguely related to networks and computers with a hint of archaeology, and some gender studies too).

Thursday April 16:

5: Forum: diverse digital archaeologies – A CAA-NA and DDIG event (8AM)
48: General session: contributions to modelling in Archaeology (10:30AM)
71: Forum: Gender disparities in research grant submissions (1PM)
73: Symposium: SimulPast – Simulating the past to understand human behaviour (1PM)
84: Symposium: simulating social complexity to understand the archaeological past (1PM) I’m in this one! Shawn Graham and I will present on modelling the Roman economy –> fascinating!
103: General session: GIS, remote sensing, and archaeological mapping studies (2:30PM)

Friday April 17:

200: Symposium: macroscopic approaches to archaeological histories: insights into archaeological practice from digital methods (10:30AM) I am in this session as well! Will be talking about citation networks.
221: Electric symposium: open methods in archaeology: how to encourage reproducible research as the default practice (1PM)
Lightning talks on Digital Archaeology (8PM)

Saturday April 18:

289: Mind the gap: archaeological approaches to null data spaces (8AM)

Pelagios colloquium “Linked Pasts”

The Pelagios project has been providing the Humanities with linked data goodness for a few years now. This year the project will host a two-day colloquium that will be of interest to those reading this blog. More details below.

When? 20-21 July 2015

Where? King’s College London

Dear all,

The Pelagios project is pleased to announce a two-day colloquium on the subject of “Linked Pasts”. Bringing together leading exponents of Linked Data from across the Humanities and Cultural Heritage sector, we address some of the challenges to developing a digital ecosystem of online open materials, through two days of position papers, discussion and breakout group activity. Day 1 will tackle the themes of Time, Geo and People, and issues of Open Data, Classification Schemes and Infrastructure. Day 2 will be devoted to two parallel structured activities, one exploring Niches (space, time, people), and the other Nutrition Cycles (open data, classification, infrastructure). For details of the line up of talks and contributors, see below.

Venue and date: The Great Hall, KCL (Strand Campus), 20-21 July 2015

Refreshments (tea/coffee, lunch) will be provided, along with a reception on Monday evening. The event is free of charge but places are limited. To reserve your place, go to: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/pelagios-linked-pasts-tickets-16278937741.

Day 1

   Welcome – Pelagios: A Linked Pasts Ecosystem?

   Keynote – Sebastian Heath (NYU), TBA

Session 1

   Time – Ryan Shaw (UNC), An Ecosystem of Time Periods: PeriodO (http://perio.do/)

   Geo – Ruth Mostern (UC Merced), An Ecosystem of Places: Gazetteers

   People – Gabriel Bodard (KCL), An Ecosystem of People: SNAP (http://snapdrgn.net/)

Session 2

   Open Data – Mia Ridge (OU), Trends and Practice within Cultural Heritage

   Classification schemes – Antoine Isaac (Amsterdam), Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/)

Day 2

Session 3: Towards an Infrastructure

   Rainer Simon (AIT): The Recogito Annotation Platform (http://pelagios.org/recogito/)

   Humphrey Southall (Portsmouth): PastPlace gazetteer (http://pastplace.org/)

   Guenther Goerz (Erlangen): WissKI (http://wiss-ki.eu/)

   Holly Wright/Doug Tudhope: Ariadne (http://www.ariadneproject.org/)

Session 4

   Structured Activity 1: Niches (Space, Time, People)

   Structured Activity 2: Nutrition Cycles (Open Data, Classification, Infrastructure)

Wrap up: feedback, next steps + community actions

Spaghetti monster interview

The awesome team at the ‘Six degrees of spaghetti monsters’ blog have recently published an interview with myself. You’ll notice from the questions that it’s not your average interview, for a start there is way too much talk about networks for it to be average. But the questions also ranged from Harry Potter to centrality measures, and the blog’s editors’ replies touched on James Bond, Hitler and Caribbean beer. So if you wanna know some stuff about me that you actually don’t wanna know, read the interview here.